Tech news tagged ‘materials’

The University of Southampton has officially opened its Advanced Composite Materials Facility,
“The facility, which is unique to the UK, will aim to develop and manufacture new and advanced materials for semiconductor electronics, data storage, photonics, and energy harvesting, conversion and storage,” said the University.
One of the first projects…

3M’s Optical Systems division is making a optically clear barrier films that protect sensitive electronics from water vapour and oxygen commercially available for the first time. This could have implications for the future commercial production of OLED displays which rely on use of barrier films to prevent water ingress…

A biopotential acquisition chip from IMEC and its Netherland partner Holst Centre has been singled out for praise at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco. “There has been a growing interest in wearable biopotential-monitoring systems, which have very strict requirements in terms of power dissipation, high…

Surely if flying saucers existed, they would float around like the disc in this video. The demonstration by physicist Boaz Almog from Tel Aviv University, Israel, at the Association of Science-Technology centres (ASTC) Annual Conference in Baltimore, Maryland, earlier this week illustrates how a superconducting plate can be fixed…

Georgia Tech has taken another step towards air-stable flexible electronics with a pentacene transistor that matches the mobility of amorphous silicon devices. The university’s contribution is a bi-layer gate insulator that does not deteriorate with time. “The reason that we get such stable operation is a compensation…

Actel reckons the 65nm embedded flash process it is developing with UMC will be the first in the world to run products in commercial volumes. “We’ve been working for two years with UMC to develop the process and it’s progressing well”, Esam Elashmawi, vp of silicon engineering at…

Californian scientist have used a phone as the basis of a low-cost medical microscope for the developing world, with built-in image analysis. Prototypes have allowed the diagnosis of malaria, sickle cells disease, and tuberculosis. “In all cases, resolution exceeded that necessary to detect blood cell and microorganism morphology…

Researches from Chicago have found a way to turn nanocrystals into conductive solids without ruining their optical activity. Nanocrystalline get their behaviour not only from the materials they are made from, but their size and shape. Hence their opto-electronic properties can be tuned by making the crystals bigger or…